麒

A phono-semantic compound:

鹿 (deer) — semantic component, classifies the creature within the deer / hoofed-beast family;

其 (that; it; a particle) — phonetic component, supplies the reading 기 (gi / qí), used purely for sound with no semantic contribution.

麒 is a literary and classical character, appearing almost exclusively as the first half of the compound 麒麟 — the full name of the mythical creature. It is rarely written alone.

기린 (麒麟) — the qilin; the male is 麒 (기) and the female is 麟 (린), though the compound 麒麟 refers to the creature as a whole regardless of sex.

기린아 (麒麟兒) — a child of outstanding talent and promise; a prodigy; a gifted young person destined for greatness.

Idiomatic expressions:

기린아 (麒麟兒) — used in Korean to describe a remarkably gifted child or young talent, drawing on the qilin's classical role as an omen of the birth of a great sage or ruler.

麒 and 麟 form an inseparable pair, each incomplete without the other. Classical tradition assigns sex to the two halves — 麒 the male, 麟 the female — but in practice the compound 麒麟 functions as the name of the creature entire. See the companion entry for 麟 (U+9E9F) for the full mythological and cosmological context of the qilin.

The four sacred creatures of classical cosmology (四靈):

龍 — dragon

鳳 — phoenix

龜 — tortoise

麒麟 — qilin

麒麟 stands at the head of this group in some traditions, appearing only in ages of perfect virtue and vanishing when the age declines. Its arrival accompanies the birth of great sages; its death signals the end of an era.

Related characters:

麟 — the female qilin (companion character, U+9E9F)

猉 — puppy; also variant of 麒 (개사슴록변 phenomenon)

鳳 — phoenix (fellow sacred creature)

龍 — dragon (fellow sacred creature)

Classical citations:

《春秋·哀公十四年》 (Spring and Autumn Annals)

「西狩獲麟」

"On a western hunt, a qilin was captured."

The most celebrated appearance of the qilin in classical literature. Confucius laid down his brush upon hearing the news, ending the Spring and Autumn Annals. The capture of 麒麟 marked, for him, the closing of a meaningful age — the creature's fate bound to the philosopher's own sense of history.

《禮記·禮運》 (Book of Rites)

「麟·鳳·龜·龍，謂之四靈」

"The qilin, phoenix, tortoise, and dragon are called the Four Numinous Creatures."

The canonical formulation placing 麒麟 at the head of the four sacred animals of Chinese cosmology.

《史記·孔子世家》 (Records of the Grand Historian)

「獲麟，吾道窮矣」

"The qilin is taken — my way has reached its end."

Sima Qian records Confucius's lament, making the fate of 麒麟 inseparable from the philosopher's own sense of the age coming to a close.

The variant 猉 presents the same scribal phenomenon documented in the entry for 麟: the substitution of 犭 (dog radical) for the complex 鹿 (deer radical) as an abbreviated writing form.

猉 originally denoted a puppy or small dog — an entirely unrelated meaning — but was pressed into service as a simplified stand-in for 麒 due to the visual and stroke-count burden of writing 鹿.

This cross-radical substitution practice became common enough in Korean paleographic tradition to generate its own dedicated term: 개사슴록변 (dog-deer radical), acknowledging that the boundary between 犭 and 鹿 was routinely blurred in cursive and abbreviated writing.